TALKING HEADS 

Inside the gruesome beheading experiments that ‘proved’ victims stayed conscious for up to 30 SECONDS after the chop

Reports of severed heads reacting angrily to be slapped and shouted at in France after being guillotined fuelled interest in the grisly subject

THIS is the astonishing story of the grisly experiments which claimed to prove that severed heads remain conscious for up to 30 SECONDS after being guillotined.

Throughout the 19th and 20th Century, French doctors investigated whether the freshly-executed victims stayed alive in the moments following their death.

One noted case involved murderer Charlotte Corday who was publicly executed in 1793.

According to reports at the time, Corday’s severed head was lifted up by the executioner and slapped across the face.

And to the shock of the baying crowd, the victim’s face blushed and appeared angry at being struck.

But the most famous case was conducted by a Dr Beaurieux who claims a severed head responded to him when he shouted in its face.

Beaurieux documented the experiment, conducted on June 28, 1905, with the body part of criminal Henri Languille in his medical journal.

He wrote: “The head fell on the severed surface of the neck and I did not therefore have to take it up in my hands, as all the newspapers have vied with each other in repeating.

"Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds.

"I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased.

“The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead.

“It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions."

Dr Beaurieux compared the glare that Languille gave him with "people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

He continued: “Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.

“I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. "

Beaurieux said he called out for a second time, and again Languille's eyes fixed on his.

He added: “The eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time.”

The doctor then called out a third time but by this time Languille was most certainly dead and did not respond.

He said: “The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds.”

By the mid-20th Century there was debate within France whether the guillotine was in fact as humane as its supporters claimed.

In 1950s, a government study by doctors Piedelievre and Fournier concluded that death by guillotine "is not instantaneous.”

The report, titled Justice Without the Executioner, added: “Every vital element survives decapitation. (It is) a savage vivisection followed by a premature burial."

The last man to guillotined in France was Tunisian-born killer Hamida Djandoubi in 1977 – who tortured and murdered his former girlfriend in 1974.

Djandoubi became the last person in western Europe to be executed by the state while France officially abolished capital punishment in 1981.

French authorities had already banned public executions after the beheading of Eugène Weidmann in 1939 which was secretly filmed by a member of the "hysterical" crowd in Versailles.

However, there is one decpitated head which still "lives on" at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Medicine.

Diogo Alves was Portugal's first serial killer and one of the last people to be executed in the country in 1841.

His severed head, which was actually cut off by and studied by scientists following his hanging, is now preserved in a glass jar in the medical school.